I am a dreamer whose dream is to find, capture, and share with others the magic of life in writing, painting, and poetry. I may be unconventional and mischievous at times, but my work is guided by love built upon a foundation of kindness, divine beauty that only the inner eye would see, and feelings that can only be measured by the depth of an ocean. My birthplace, Sadec, instills in me Strength, Faith, Hope, Love, and Healing power to go through life and to nurture my soul. Sadec defines me.

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Personal Stories of My Working Life in America

September 5th, 2016 is American
Labor Day, a holiday that always brings back memories of hundreds of stories of American working class—stories which I've learned and experienced through my work
with several federal agencies over four decades. And I remember them well.

January 2010. Lily Ha, the
Vietnamese-American witness sitting next to me on the witness stand, nervously laid her
shaken left hand on her expensive black silk dress that covered her unusually
skinny thighs. “He started by pushing me down and choking me…,” said Lily, in a
trembling voice, describing to the 12 jurors her job, a sex act with her former
customer, the 41 years old African American male defendant who was sitting by
his attorney at the defense table. I glanced at a glassy streak of tear on
Lily’s cheek and put my right hand on her hand and, with my left hand, tucked a
tissue under her well-manicured fingers with long, red fingernails.She immediately dabbed her cheeks with the
tissue.

American labor law and labor union groups
protect the mainstream American workforce by preventing employers from denying
them minimum wage, overtime pay, or prevailing wages when applicable, or other
work-related issues. But many workers, mostly from diverse cultural backgrounds,
working in traditional or non-traditional professions, have been abused and
exploited, without getting much attention from mainstream American media. In
1982, Studs Terkel’s “Working” piqued my interest and curiosity in the meaning
of work that American workers, mired down in their quotidian, mundane details
at work, still had. Labor Day in America, first observed in 1882, nearly 100
years before I became an American citizen, means more to me than just a day
dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. Through
my employment, I have become a recipient of many incredible stories told by
workers I interviewed. Labor Day has become a day to remember their stories of
suffering, abuse, and mistreatment at work—unlike stories in Studs Terkel’s
“Working.”

Although Lily, the above witness on stand,
looked beautiful and delicate, she was not a female. A transgender prostitute
living and working in the Tenderloin neighborhood in SF, she was on the stand
at the SF Superior Court, testifying as a witness on a case against a suspect
who was accused of killing another transgender prostitute from Nicaragua,
Ordenana, in 2007 after the perpetrator raped and strangled her, then left her
dead, naked body by the freeway in Potreo Hill. DNA tied him to more attacks on
transgender prostitutes. Lily herself suffered the same rape and brutal
attacks. Luckily, she survived after she was choked, beaten, stripped naked,
and thrown out of the perpetrator’s truck. And she lived to testify against
him. In one of my freelance jobs, I was interpreting for her on the stand. I
was intrigued by the details of the case, which I took an oath to keep
confidential until the trial was over and its details became public. I was also
fascinated by other court cases in which working people became crime victims
although the personal stories behind each case were my focus, not the crimes.

Lily testified that she needed money for
meth. Despite the pain and humiliation, she enjoyed good moments when she had
money, sat in a coffee shop, or out for “pho”
(soup), or “banh mi” (sandwich), with
her co-workers or friends. As we were alone, she talked about planning trips to
her hometown in Vietnam and dreaming of home with her people, familiar food,
and even the heat. I knew for fact that working people like herself were the
most generous ones in donating money to causes or showing care for, and
assistance to, those who needed her help back home even though she had become
an American.

I came to know endless stories of working
class in America, especially those with diverse ethnic backgrounds. In the
1980s and 1990s, during our annual federal law enforcement (MSPA) trips to
farming areas in Gilroy, Monterey, and Napa, I witnessed how Mexican farm
workers sacrificed for their families by living in inadequate, substandard housing
while working up to 12 hours a day, saving money to send home in Mexico. Once I
surveyed and uncovered extremely primitive housing conditions in Gilroy where a
group of 10 Mexican workers lived together in one room, cooked on a broken old
stove, bathed in a creek, and went to the bathroom in abandoned chicken coops. And
each paid the Farm Labor Contractor $50 a month for that living arrangement.

But mainstream American workers also had their
share of mistreatment. The bulk of my investigative work was in the area of
government contracts. In one case, a group of former police officers reported
to me a situation at a former Air Force Base where they worked.Through my investigation, I discovered that
the USDOD, in solving the security situation at a federal housing airbase with
some 5,000 individual homes and no MPs (Military Police) due to the base
closure, had hired retired police officers, paid them security guard rates,
dressed them as DOD police, and assigned them duties belonged to the former
Military Police classification, minus the arrest power—a classification that
required higher pay. The problem was corrected and I gave credits to the
workers who testified.

But other ethnic Americans often refused to
speak up even for their benefits. In one case, a Romanian-American sub
contractor working on a construction project under the Davis Bacon Act, at the
Alameda NAS, would show in his book that he paid prevailing wage rates. But he
had falsely reduced the actual hours worked otherwise the pay would be much
less than the required rates, if using the correct number of hours. His
workers, mostly Romanian-Americans would not testify, or provide me the facts.
But I proved the violations nonetheless.

“How late did you and the crew work during
the week of the October 17th, 1989?” I asked the Romanian-American contractor
when I interviewed him in 1989.

“It’s in the book. 4PM every day. We left
work even before 4PM,” the contractor answered. I changed the subject and began
to talk about the weather, the traffic, then suddenly asked, “Oh, on October 17th,
did you feel the Loma Prieta earthquake?”

“Yes, we were shaken by the impact and
immediately stopped working. I told the workers, ‘This is a big one. A real big
one,” and then we had to go home,” the man said, describing his shocking
reaction with raised shoulders, slacked-mouth, and eyes rolled skyward.

Slowly, I looked deep into his eyes, “Do you
remember what time the earthquake took place? 5:04PM. How late did you guys
plan to work that evening if the earthquake did not occur?”

Among other cases, I received a few allegations that workers
at Your Black Muslim Bakery in Berkeley were being abused. The employer, Yusef Bey,
was from a cultural background of African American. The situation was brought
to my attention through complaints after complaints filed by a non-Muslim
employee at that Your Black Muslim Bakery. The complainant kept reporting that
firearms being stored in the compound, foreigners being smuggled in, and
employees being restrained, physically and sexually abused and intimidated. Yet
there was no alleged government intervention to rescue the victims until after
Bey’s death. Then, sometime around 2007, the Bakery went bankrupt and closed
after the murder of a local journalist, Chauncey Bailey, who was investigating
the allegations.

Over the years, I had become familiar with
the way workers from different cultural backgrounds viewed their employment
situations without taking consideration their legal and constitutional rights.
As we investigated Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican, or Korean sweatshops, or Asian
supermarkets, employers stonewalled us while the workers gave us a cold
shoulder as if saying, “Leave us alone. You’re not helping us for coming here.
You cause troubles for our employer, the business will suffer, and we lose our
jobs. We don’t need your help.”

One day I sat down next to a young Chinese
garment-shop worker who was making buttonholes on a piece of garment and told
her, “Look, I am not here to help you. I am here to get your help for me to
understand why the labor law is irrelevant here. You will do me a favor by
telling me the truth and I won’t take it against you and your co-workers.
Please help me.”

Without looking up, she continued to operate
the buttonhole sewing machine while answering me, “You see how slow I am with
these buttonholes? An experience seamstress can do twice faster. Look at the
elderly lady with a clipper over there. All she does all day is clipping the
loose ends of the threads in each garment. How much do you think the owner can
afford to pay us? Whenever I receive a garment for sewing, I can’t read the
instructions so the owner has to show me how to do it, and she corrects my
mistakes. I am grateful to her. I can’t get another job because I don’t speak
English and have no real skills. So don’t tell me about minimum wages. I don’t
want the pay. I want a job and I want to belong to this shop and be with these
workers.” Then she added, “Where I am from, we accept. We don’t make wave.”

My recollection of the conversation with that
garment-shop worker reminded me of another tragic working condition, which I
considered worse than slavery in Medieval Times.

In 2007, I had some freelance jobs with the
US ICE (Immigration Control Enforcement). They were investigating a Sex Tourism
case whereas an American from LA, who went to Cambodia, bought a house and
several Asian girls ages 9 to 14 to work in his house and to service his needs.
The girls’ parents sold them for $500 (US dollars) each. $200 went to the
broker and $300 to the parents. The girls had no schooling. So they performed
housework and did what they were required to do to survive. I remember teaching
the investigators to understand the cultural aspects of their interviews with
the girls. For their birthdates the kids would say, “I was born in the year of
the snake, or the rooster, or the cat.” They did not know the calendar year of their
birth. To describe a major event, they would say, “It happened before or after
the New Year.” Approximately, a Vietnamese New Year takes place in February
whereas in Thailand or Cambodia, it would be in April. And they used a myriad
of terminology not found in the dictionary. After the investigation, the
perpetrator was convicted on all 7 counts in the U.S. Federal Courts.

These cases are the exception not the norm.
For the most parts, mainstream American workers have the option to exercise
their rights under the law and/or through Union’s intervention. As the society
evolves, some of the abuses have become things of the past. Sometime in 1990s,
I trained a bright grad student from UC Berkeley, Dante, to be an investigator.
My focus was changing the situations by changing people’s perceptions. After
the training, Dante repeatedly told others the story how I had trained him—a
story that made me blushed.

Dante would say, “At the Final Conference, I told the couple
employers that they owed their employees nearly $20,000. They practically told
me to bust off because they had no money to pay. I threatened to send the case
to the Solicitors to no avail. I then asked Kim to intervene. She came in, sat
down, leaned back, hands steepling showing a large, flashy rock on her ring
finger, then told the couple, ‘Look, your employees have given you their time,
energy, sweat, and a piece of their life. It’s only fair that you pay them.
After all, it’s only money.’ The couple looked at each other. Then the wife
told her husband, ‘She’s right, it’s only money.’ And they agreed to pay.”

Perhaps I was lucky.

ENDP.S. I touched three most sensitive subjects in my working life when I first mentioned in the above blog the trial of the murderer of a SF transgender prostitute, Ordenana, a trial that hit the SF transgender community very hard. Then I talked about the murder of one of the best Bay Area journalists at heart, Chauncey Bailey, who was murdered to stop his story of Your Black Muslim Bakery. Lastly, I wrote about my work with US ICE in which the perpetrator who went to Cambodia and purchased little girls to service him and he was convicted and sentenced to 210 years in prison. I wish to express condolences to the victims. I hope the reader would think of them and show them some respect. These are the links to these true stories:

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Sadec In My Heart

About Me

I left Sadec at 15 but my heart is still filled with emotion and desires for beauty in nature, life, and people in Sadec. I love the Sadec rivers where fishermen threw their nets against the rising sun while floating water hyacinth and their delicate lavender flowers hosted the dragonfly guests with angelic wings. I love the paddy fields surrounded the village where the rice paddies’ glassy waters reflected the blue sky and intense green foliage as mirrors, partially framed by patches of rice stalks and muddy paths as I would inhale the pungent aroma of mango, longan, dorian, and mulberry blossoms. I love my back yard in Sadec where the creek water allowed me to visualize the colorful small fish seemingly swimming side by side with the reflected birds, while the trees touching the clouds. I still love the tingling sensation of bathing in the rain and the fulfilling taste of a handful of rainwater falling from a palm-leafed roof, or the bright, full moon that caressed my face with its silvery moonlight. These are some of the things I love about Sadec as I journey back. K. N. Roberts